“One Battle After Another,” released last month and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, lived up to its name for me; it was an exhausting watch. Not in a bad way, though—I was on the edge of my seat for its entire nearly three-hour runtime. The film is an action movie that simultaneously thrills you and allows you to feel the time pass while you are watching. It is also a family drama with prescient political commentary. I was initially excited to see how Anderson, who has a diverse filmography but is known for portraying intense, psychologically rich themes in his work, would tackle this more overtly political, less character-driven film. In an interview for his earlier film “Magnolia” (1999), he said his goal was to make an epic film about “family relationships” instead of “important social topics,” which did not interest him at the time. While this movie definitely dips its toes into some important social topics, it continuously returns to those ideas of family, love and loss.
The first act introduces us to the lofty but short-lived goals of a group of leftist revolutionaries called the French 75 as they execute missions, including freeing people from an immigration detention center and shutting down power grids. The key members of this group are Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), who quickly fall in love with each other. At the same time, Perfidia becomes involved with immigration enforcement officer Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn). They have a complicated relationship; he fetishizes her as a Black woman, but she actually flips this power dynamic to manipulate him and avoid being arrested. Unbeknownst to Pat, he becomes the biological father of her child, Charlene (Chase Infiniti). Penn gave one of my favorite performances of the film by capturing the perfect combination of evil and pitiful. Both Pat and Lockjaw want Perfidia to be something she simply is not; Pat wants her to stay and raise Charlene together, which she rejects by leaving him to continue working with the French 75. After she is eventually arrested, Lockjaw gives her the loaded offer of “the embrace of the federal government”, or legal protection if she betrays her comrades’ identities and lives with him, which she initially accepts before escaping and vanishing across the border. This messy love triangle works as an allegory for the entanglement of the personal and political, or how the state and the family at once reinforce and conflict with each other as institutions in America.
To see the ramifications of these actions and tensions, the movie skips forward 16 years. Pat and Charlene live in hiding under the aliases of Bob and Willa Ferguson in the sanctuary city of Baktan Cross, California; Bob is a paranoid stoner who needs to be virtually babysat by Willa, who has grown into a confident teenager. Lockjaw has sublimated his sexual frustration over Perfidia into a quest to join a white supremacist group comically named the Christmas Adventurers Club; he has decided to hunt down Bob and Willa to eliminate the evidence of his past involvement with Perfidia. To achieve this, he mobilizes the expansive apparatus of the authoritarian government in the film’s parallel-universe version of the United States—immigration enforcement officers, the local police and private entities, such as a morally conflicted bounty hunter—to terrorize Baktan Cross’ immigrant community and crash Willa’s high school prom, among other things.
The film’s portrayal of immigration crackdowns and broader government repression resonates deeply with the ICE raids within America throughout Trump’s second presidency so far. Importantly, though, the film has, according to Anderson, been in the works for years as a loose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel “Vineland,” which dissects Reagan-era conservatism. The movie’s revolutionaries are represented through details that reflect the 1960s counterculture and the Black Panthers; ideas that still exist in our cultural imagination but have no material equivalent today. To view the film as simply a reaction to the current moment would be a disservice to understanding the historical basis of the issues it portrays. As Perfidia notes in a voiceover, 16 years after her escape, the world had changed very little in that time.
The movie, however, did fall a little short of perfect for me. My main gripe is that many characters lack depth and true emotional development. The film obviously wants you to root for Willa, but it feels a bit like a process of elimination because everyone else is either so incredibly pathetic, like Bob and obviously Lockjaw, or sadly underutilized. For example, the convent of kickass ninja nuns that get about three minutes of screentime before they all get arrested. Justice for the nuns!
Would I recommend it, though? Of course. There is so much more I could say about it. Here are just a few more things that really, really worked for me. First, the cinematography was incredible. Tense scenes like car chases are really effectively shot with a choppy, fast-paced mix of unsteady handheld footage, POV shots and disorienting angles. The scenes at Willa’s high school are short but are genuinely the most realistic media portrayals of young adults I have ever seen. It was very refreshing to watch something that resists the “Euphoria”-ization of the high school experience.
Ultimately, “One Battle After Another” gives a frankly terrifying portrayal of a government that can find out seemingly anything and do whatever it wants to people with no consequences. Without giving away the details, it also shows alternatives where one’s chosen family and community can triumph to come out the other side stronger than before. Really, “One Battle After Another” boils down to a new version of the family stories Anderson has been telling for decades, and there is nothing wrong with that.